The Spreadsheet Was Never the Problem

Every founder has the spreadsheet. You know the one.

It has a tab nobody else could navigate. A formula in column G that only works because of something you did back in March and never wrote down. A row shaded yellow for a reason you've long since forgotten but are afraid to delete. It's ugly. It's fragile. And it's the single most honest picture of your business that exists anywhere.

So when someone — a vendor, an advisor, a well-meaning investor — tells you to "just get off the spreadsheet," something in you tightens. Not because you love it. Because the spreadsheet knows things.

Here's what the software companies keep getting wrong: the spreadsheet was never the problem.

What the spreadsheet actually is

It isn't a tool. It's a memory.

It quietly encodes the weird, specific logic of your business — the customer who always pays at 45 days no matter what the invoice says, the contractor you front cash to, the slow season that shows up like clockwork. No off-the-shelf product knows any of that on day one. Your spreadsheet learned it the hard way, one painful surprise at a time.

And this isn't a small-business quirk. The 2025 AFP benchmarking survey found 96% of finance professionals still use spreadsheets as a planning tool every week, and 17% run on them exclusively. These are people whose entire job is finance, with the budgets to buy whatever they want. They still open Excel on Monday morning.

The reason is the same for the Fortune 500 controller and the solo founder: the spreadsheet bends to the business. Most software asks the business to bend to it.

But it's also lying to you

Hold both of these in your head at once, because they're both true.

The research behind that same survey found 94% of business spreadsheets contain at least one critical error. The sheet that knows your business by heart will also, silently, get the math wrong — a range that didn't stretch when you added a row, a hardcoded number sitting where a formula should be — and it will never once tell you. You find out later, usually right after you've made a decision on a figure that had been wrong for three versions.

A spreadsheet remembers everything about your business except the mistakes it's making right now.

What a tool actually has to earn

So the question was never "spreadsheet or software." It's what a tool has to earn before it deserves the keys.

It has to learn your business, not lecture it. It has to do the remembering and catch the errors. It has to hand you five minutes back, not demand five hours of setup first.

That's a high bar, and it's exactly why most founders are still in the spreadsheet — and mostly right to be. More than half of small businesses now lean on AI somewhere in the operation, up from around 40% just two years ago. But the smart split, the same one any good bookkeeper follows, is letting the machine handle the transaction grind while you keep the judgment calls. A tool earns trust by respecting that line, not erasing it.

Years ago, the answer to all of this was a sharper spreadsheet and a later night. It's why my co-founder Pam and I built MyRunwayHealth the way we did — to carry the memory the way your spreadsheet does, and catch the mistakes the way your spreadsheet won't. Not to replace the thing that understands your business. To be the first thing that earns the right to sit next to it.

Final thoughts

Keep the spreadsheet. Love it, even. But know what it is: a brilliant memory with no conscience.

It remembers everything and verifies nothing. It tells you the truth about your business and lies about its own math. And if you can find something that does the first part without the second? That's the day you stop rebuilding the file and start running the company.

The spreadsheet was never the problem. It was just doing a job nobody should ever have asked a spreadsheet to do alone.

What's the one thing your spreadsheet knows about your business that no software has ever managed to learn?